Two Poems by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo

Nuclear Fictions

We are completely miserable

but no one can tell

from the smiles on our faces.

Everyone is watching us on TV from home.

They think it’s a show about foxes.

They know we know.

We bow to the image of their desire.  

It’s a game where the plastic is missing.

The world keeps coming

in and out of our coats.

So we give them a show.

Here, the hummingbird

flushed in a cool electric drizzle.

We run home in the rain

because we are banal.

We replay our childhood

braided among the apple trees.

Then the morning, then puberty,

then coffee before headed to work,

Then the cream colored walls,

cheap red lipstick through a dirty mirror.

This is the way you look at me

when we are going nowhere.

To them there’s always a man on the left

walking away from a woman.

There’s always a woman on the right

walking away from a man.

Sometimes I can’t tell if the cameras are on.

We nod our obedient heads.

Let them watch.

Let the sun sink to the surface of someone else’s sky.

If we leave our bodies now,

they will find their way back to us eventually.

They always do.

Until then, touch me, I am gentle.

This has nothing to do with the rain.    

Let’s lean into the creek

and stare at ourselves in the water,

and wash our faces before we drown in them.

First Wedding Dance

The music stopped playing years ago

but we’re still dancing.

There’s your bright skirt scissoring

through the crowd—

our hips tipping the instruments over.

You open me up and walk inside

until you reach a river

where a child is washing her feet.

You aren’t sure

if I am the child

or if I am the river.

You throw a stone

and the child wades in to find it.

This is memory.

Let’s say the river is too deep

so you turn around and leave

the same way you entered—

spent and unwashed.

It’s ok. We are young, and

our gowns are as long as the room.

I told you I always wanted a silk train.

We can both be the bride,

we can both empty our lover.

And there’s nothing different about you—

about me—about any of this.

Only that we wish it still hurt, just once.

Like the belts our fathers whipped us with,

not to hurt us but just to make sure we remembered.  

Like the cotton ball, dipped in alcohol,

rubbed gently on your arm

moments before the doctor asks you to breathe.

Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is the author of Cenzontle, winner of the A. Poulin Jr. Prize  (BOA Editions 2018), DULCE, winner of the  sixth annual Drinking Gourd Prize (Northwestern University press 2017), and Children of the Land: a Hybrid Memoir (Harper Collins Publishers in 2020). He can be reached at marcelohernandezcastillo.com